FWIW, are stand-up meetings really more productive and effective than other sort of physical meetings?
In my experience, they are, but only if they're done right. A stand-up meeting, of the type we're discussing, is very focused. The core development team goes one by one and says:
* I did this yesterday * I'm doing this today * Here are my impediments (if any).
That's it. Shouldn't be more than 30 seconds per person. If it is, you're doing it wrong. If you try and architect out a solution in the stand-up - you're doing it wrong. If you try and fix problems (impediments) in the stand-up - you're doing it wrong.
We have someone who's really bad at this. She rambles on and on about the architecture of what she's working on, the coding details, etc. We're trying to get past that, because it's not the point of the meeting and it reduces the effectiveness.
After the stand-up meeting, you may have follow-up meetings or conversations based on what came out of the individual discussions.
In the civilian world, if you have meetings every day, it's because your boss or some other important idiot is a bottleneck in the process and they need daily reinforcement of common sense, at the expense of department productivity.
From the article:
The current wave of stand-up meeting is being fueled by the growing use of "Agile," an approach to software development, crystallized in a manifesto published by 17 software professionals in 2001.
Which is true.
Don't be so quick to blame management. I know it's a reflex here on/., but the current craze for stand-up meetings, scrum, agile, etc., are being driven by tech staff.
It's no worse than this guy comparing the police, FBI, and Scotland Yard to the Stasi, KGB, and Gestapo, and getting modded +5.
Personally, I see Anonymous as a cross between Robin Hood and Loki.
Oh, I see. You have the naive moral vacuousness of a 14 year old girl day-dreaming after listening to Taylor Swift singing about Romeo & Juliet and a prince on a white horse. Super, now I feel good. Mind you, at least that puts you on the same intellectual level as the script kiddies who comprise Anonymous and demonstrates you have the same stunning inability to comprehend any kind of complex situation that veers ever so slightly away from binary black and white.
They are moral, legal and operational equivalents of Inspector Javert.
Wow. Just wow.
People like you want all policing operatives, world wide, to be so emasculated and hindered that they can't arrest someone for plain-as-day murder until they've called the ACLU as a witness to the arrest.
Isn't it lucky that all criminals are so polite and moral, and won't take advantage of the continual weakening of any fom of authority that you advocate?
Apparently most people on Facebook and Twitter do want that.
Sigh. I wish this stupid/. meme would disappear. Unbelievably, some people in the world are able to exercise self restraint. Some of them also like to use Facebook or Twitter. These are not mutually exclusive traits.
I suppose you think that most people who are on Google+ also suffer from this lack of ability to self filter?
We shouldn't allow such complex laws that we need lawyers.
Common sense isn't (common, that is). Selfishness is ubiquitous. It is a depressing commentary on the human race that we do, indeed, need such complex laws.
Does that matter to the creator? Whether the music/video pirate sells the product or just shares it freely, the net effect is the same to the person who produced that work.
Who wants to come up with the next great music album/movie, when you know damn well that the second you do, lots of pirates with no scruples are just going to swoop in and steal it?
Actually, it did. I don't have to worry about someone changing their e-mail and forgetting to e-mail me. They're still on Facebook. Instead of me and 40 other people having to update our address books, it's updated once, by the person who changed their address, and it's seamless to everyone else.
I don't have to log into a separate chat program. It's built into Facebook. I could have multiple chat programs running (some people are on Yahoo Messenger, some are on a different IM client), or some kind of federated one, but if anyone changes their chat client all of their friends have to update their contact lists accordingly. I don't have to worry about that with Facebook.
You don't have to like it. But it is pretty darned convenient.
I wouldn't say I like or dislike them (although they seem to be trying to make themselves pretty unlikable these days). But I have always been wary of Google because they gather so much data.
So I just don't use them.
And no, it's not exactly a good thing logically. It's twisting words (i.e. lawyers doing lawyer things and picking pedantic holes in texts to get around the clear intention of the law).
What'll happen if this somehow gets through and they're not careful is the recording industry will say "fine, you be jerks, we'll be jerks back. These are now computer programs and subject to paragraph* 109 (b)(4). Have a nice day".
Thanks for a well reasoned reply. But here's what I meant about Janimal's comments.
The examples of keying a car or taking it for a joyride are clearly describing actions that are wrong, but how is it different from the arguments in favor of piracy? I won't repeat all of Janimal's arguments. Suffice to say I haven't seen any responses that actually answer those questions.
It doesn't matter whether Beyonce or Lady Gaga or Elton John can afford the loss of a few dollars. Wrong is wrong. But even if you go that route, those examples you mention are the few, the elite, the top of the food chain. There are thousands more who are struggling to make a living from their passion for music.
Session musicians;
Sound engineers;
Recording studio owner;
Geeks - these days recording studios are computered up like you wouldn't believe;
On and on it goes.
On the other hand, if I do like the music, who's to say I won't buy the CD?
There's the problem. Will you buy the CD? If you've already got your free copy, why would you? And even if you do, there are plenty of posters on Slashdot who proudly and defiantly announce "no way, _I_ won't buy a CD" and then ramble on about how it's justified because of the evils of the RIAA.
"Make a donation to the musician", etc., are all nice theories, but they're mainly just platitudes. People don't. Ask the bands who've tried it that way. Most of them will never do it again.
This is guaranteed to get modded down because it's anti-piracy
Yes, and everyone is predictably screaming "noooo, no no no, not because it's anti-piracy". If that wasn't it, people would leave it up and instead answer with well thought out debating points.
But nope. Like you say, forget trying to express an anti-piracy position here. Pointless.
Just to be clear, the post I was responding to included this gem right before that bit about the data sink:
Being a geek and techie, I saw Facebook for what it really was
Anyway, beyond that...I am on Facebook now and I click "Edit Profile". Just about everything there has a little x beside it. Hover over it, and it pops up a message saying "Remove". On my main profile page, there's a checkmark to show my sex on my profile. I don't have to. There's a drop down right underneath my birthdate with options to show my full DOB, just the month and day, or nothing.
Every entry I've ever made for employers or schools has that x beside it. Hover, and it says "remove this employer" or "remove this school".
Profile picture - there's a link right underneath it saying "Remove this picture".
Honestly, I get what you're saying, but I think that in this day and age anyone who's savvy enough to use Facebook can be reasonably expected to understand a checkmark, or to hover over the remove/x and see what it says.
And as a matter of interest, something I only just observed: on the "General Account Settings" page is a link to Download a copy of my Facebook data. I click on it and it tells me:
Easily download and browse through a personal archive of your Facebook photos, posts and messages. Learn more about downloading a copy of your information.
As well as details on what is and isn't in that download archive.
Well, that's interesting. Think I'll do that right now.
Hmm, Score:5, Insightful. Apparently there are at least three or four moderators who suffer the same overwhelming superiority complex and lack of connection to the real world as you do.
Here are some hints.
1. Yes, it's +5 insightful. No, that doesn't mean it really is insightful.
2. Get over yourself.
3. The geeks I know with more than half a brain have the ability to interact socially, recognize that there's more to life than just geek stuff, and are mature enough to run their lives based on what they want to do and accomplish instead of desperately seeking validation from some smarmy commentary on the internet, of all places.
4. They also have sufficient intelligence to recognize that Slashdot is a social networking site for geeks. Yes, really.
4a....and not care, so long as it serves their aim.
Don't know quite what you're doing, but your rant does demonstrate that, yeah, you really don't get it.
1) A huge personal data sink where I could put all of my information in one basket to be sold to the highest bidder, analyzed, and then acted upon with absolutely no benefit to me.
You do realize you don't have to put in lots of information, don't you? There's very, very, very little that Facebook actually requires you to enter.
2) A marginally effective communication tool. Signal to noise ratio sucked, because much like Twitter, you had a constant stream of information that was barely useful, relevant or interesting. Especially, when there is a huge trend to manipulate you into posting other people's content on your wall for marketing purposes.
Signal to noise ratio was a bit off for me, to start. So I blocked anything coming from games and turned off anything coming from the small number of people who were on my Friends list who were the worst offenders at constantly posting status updates. If I want to know anything about them, I go to their profile page.
Which turned Facebook into an incredibly useful communications tool for me. YMMV. I have regular conversations with a cousin who I hadn't seen in years because we lived on opposite sides of the world (literally) and I didn't know her e-mail address. Friends change e-mails? I don't have to know - they stay in the same place on Facebook.
3) A gaming platform thinly disguised as a social networking platform where Facebook was constantly fighting to get a real piece of the financial action taking place.
No, it's a social networking platform that sees a lucrative side business in gaming. Don't like it? Don't play the games. You don't have to, you know.
I have tried a handful of games from time to time. Yes, I tried Farmville to see what all the fuss was about. Bored me. Deleted. End of that.
And I can't imagine why you're getting a whole load of spam. I have never gotten spam from Facebook. Not once. I have received e-mails that I signed up for, until I decided, ehh, not interested, and changed my prefs. Result=nothing. As in no more e-mails. Easy.
When we disagree, refuse to participate, and quite often make condescending and derisive comments towards other people that don't understand what we see you misinterpret that as us "not getting it".
Well, yes. What's the alternative? Either you are refusing to admit that something that's not useful to you might possibly be useful to someone else, or you're just being smug and - you said it yourself - condescending because you're too cool to use Facebook, in which case you're just being an immature jerk. Or you don't get it. Which is it?
if you don't like Facebook, don't use it. Easy. Done. Move on with your life. Let the insignificant masses who are so inferior to you have their fun.
Anybody that puts money into this is a sucker
Insert standard disclaimers - past performance is no guarantee of future performance, you should only invest as much as you can afford to lose, all investments carry an element of risk, etc. An investor either makes an educated gamble, or they do something on a whim. If it's the latter, well, it doesn't matter if it's Facebook or HP, they're making an uneducated gamble.
Slashdot Mirror
FWIW, are stand-up meetings really more productive and effective than other sort of physical meetings?
In my experience, they are, but only if they're done right. A stand-up meeting, of the type we're discussing, is very focused. The core development team goes one by one and says:
* I did this yesterday
* I'm doing this today
* Here are my impediments (if any).
That's it. Shouldn't be more than 30 seconds per person. If it is, you're doing it wrong. If you try and architect out a solution in the stand-up - you're doing it wrong. If you try and fix problems (impediments) in the stand-up - you're doing it wrong.
We have someone who's really bad at this. She rambles on and on about the architecture of what she's working on, the coding details, etc. We're trying to get past that, because it's not the point of the meeting and it reduces the effectiveness.
After the stand-up meeting, you may have follow-up meetings or conversations based on what came out of the individual discussions.
In the civilian world, if you have meetings every day, it's because your boss or some other important idiot is a bottleneck in the process and they need daily reinforcement of common sense, at the expense of department productivity.
From the article:
The current wave of stand-up meeting is being fueled by the growing use of "Agile," an approach to software development, crystallized in a manifesto published by 17 software professionals in 2001.
Which is true.
Don't be so quick to blame management. I know it's a reflex here on /., but the current craze for stand-up meetings, scrum, agile, etc., are being driven by tech staff.
It's no worse than this guy comparing the police, FBI, and Scotland Yard to the Stasi, KGB, and Gestapo, and getting modded +5.
Personally, I see Anonymous as a cross between Robin Hood and Loki.
Oh, I see. You have the naive moral vacuousness of a 14 year old girl day-dreaming after listening to Taylor Swift singing about Romeo & Juliet and a prince on a white horse. Super, now I feel good. Mind you, at least that puts you on the same intellectual level as the script kiddies who comprise Anonymous and demonstrates you have the same stunning inability to comprehend any kind of complex situation that veers ever so slightly away from binary black and white.
They are moral, legal and operational equivalents of Inspector Javert.
Wow. Just wow.
People like you want all policing operatives, world wide, to be so emasculated and hindered that they can't arrest someone for plain-as-day murder until they've called the ACLU as a witness to the arrest.
Isn't it lucky that all criminals are so polite and moral, and won't take advantage of the continual weakening of any fom of authority that you advocate?
Oh wait...
You know what I'm finding is even less valuable then a certificate? An I.T. Degree...
Err, you may want to consider getting certified in English...
Do you want ME to know everything you do?
Apparently most people on Facebook and Twitter do want that.
Sigh. I wish this stupid /. meme would disappear. Unbelievably, some people in the world are able to exercise self restraint. Some of them also like to use Facebook or Twitter. These are not mutually exclusive traits.
I suppose you think that most people who are on Google+ also suffer from this lack of ability to self filter?
How many books does a senior software engineer typically have on his/her shelf?
Some stuff is inherently complex and can't be easily compressed.
We shouldn't allow such complex laws that we need lawyers.
Common sense isn't (common, that is). Selfishness is ubiquitous. It is a depressing commentary on the human race that we do, indeed, need such complex laws.
Does that matter to the creator? Whether the music/video pirate sells the product or just shares it freely, the net effect is the same to the person who produced that work.
Care to point out what Apple did steal from others?
Who mentioned stealing? The debate is just talking about ripping off someone else's idea.
And as everyone on Slashdot knows, "intellectual property" is an impossibility. (/sarcasm)
Who wants to come up with the next great music album/movie, when you know damn well that the second you do, lots of pirates with no scruples are just going to swoop in and steal it?
Actually, it did. I don't have to worry about someone changing their e-mail and forgetting to e-mail me. They're still on Facebook. Instead of me and 40 other people having to update our address books, it's updated once, by the person who changed their address, and it's seamless to everyone else.
I don't have to log into a separate chat program. It's built into Facebook. I could have multiple chat programs running (some people are on Yahoo Messenger, some are on a different IM client), or some kind of federated one, but if anyone changes their chat client all of their friends have to update their contact lists accordingly. I don't have to worry about that with Facebook.
You don't have to like it. But it is pretty darned convenient.
If everybody was on, say, Google+, then...
True.
I agree. My thought is they'll update the law to include MP3s under the cover of computer programs.
I wouldn't say I like or dislike them (although they seem to be trying to make themselves pretty unlikable these days). But I have always been wary of Google because they gather so much data.
So I just don't use them.
And no, it's not exactly a good thing logically. It's twisting words (i.e. lawyers doing lawyer things and picking pedantic holes in texts to get around the clear intention of the law).
What'll happen if this somehow gets through and they're not careful is the recording industry will say "fine, you be jerks, we'll be jerks back. These are now computer programs and subject to paragraph* 109 (b)(4). Have a nice day".
* Why on earth can't I use the paragraph symbol?
What can you do with Facebook that cannot be done more efficiently with other systems ?
Find friends I haven't seen for 20 years.
Connect up with my cousin who lived half a world away for whom I no longer had an e-mail or postal address.
Have her then be able to quickly see I'm on-line and open up a quick chat session.
Can I accomplish all of this in some other way? Of course. More efficiently? Not a chance.
Thanks for a well reasoned reply. But here's what I meant about Janimal's comments.
The examples of keying a car or taking it for a joyride are clearly describing actions that are wrong, but how is it different from the arguments in favor of piracy? I won't repeat all of Janimal's arguments. Suffice to say I haven't seen any responses that actually answer those questions.
It doesn't matter whether Beyonce or Lady Gaga or Elton John can afford the loss of a few dollars. Wrong is wrong. But even if you go that route, those examples you mention are the few, the elite, the top of the food chain. There are thousands more who are struggling to make a living from their passion for music.
On and on it goes.
On the other hand, if I do like the music, who's to say I won't buy the CD?
There's the problem. Will you buy the CD? If you've already got your free copy, why would you? And even if you do, there are plenty of posters on Slashdot who proudly and defiantly announce "no way, _I_ won't buy a CD" and then ramble on about how it's justified because of the evils of the RIAA.
"Make a donation to the musician", etc., are all nice theories, but they're mainly just platitudes. People don't. Ask the bands who've tried it that way. Most of them will never do it again.
Nuff said.
Well said.
This is guaranteed to get modded down because it's anti-piracy
Yes, and everyone is predictably screaming "noooo, no no no, not because it's anti-piracy". If that wasn't it, people would leave it up and instead answer with well thought out debating points.
But nope. Like you say, forget trying to express an anti-piracy position here. Pointless.
No, actually Janimal was bang on. Answer his argument if you can, rather than making specious non-sequiturs.
Your response is a bit of a whoosh. Can you answer the point he made? No?
Way to avoid the hard question, coward.
So get it out of your head that this is about free copies. It's not. It never has been.
Yes it is. The stuff about an open Internet is 50%genuine principles, and 50% a pompous rationalization from greedy geeks who want free copies.
entertainment is just not that important in the overall scheme of things
Agreed. And you'll see that here on /. when people get all supercilious and uppity about how bad movies are, they're all rubbish, etc., etc.
But they still pirate it.
But that's us techies.
Just to be clear, the post I was responding to included this gem right before that bit about the data sink:
Being a geek and techie, I saw Facebook for what it really was
Anyway, beyond that...I am on Facebook now and I click "Edit Profile". Just about everything there has a little x beside it. Hover over it, and it pops up a message saying "Remove". On my main profile page, there's a checkmark to show my sex on my profile. I don't have to. There's a drop down right underneath my birthdate with options to show my full DOB, just the month and day, or nothing.
Every entry I've ever made for employers or schools has that x beside it. Hover, and it says "remove this employer" or "remove this school".
Profile picture - there's a link right underneath it saying "Remove this picture".
Honestly, I get what you're saying, but I think that in this day and age anyone who's savvy enough to use Facebook can be reasonably expected to understand a checkmark, or to hover over the remove/x and see what it says.
And as a matter of interest, something I only just observed: on the "General Account Settings" page is a link to Download a copy of my Facebook data. I click on it and it tells me:
Easily download and browse through a personal archive of your Facebook photos, posts and messages. Learn more about downloading a copy of your information.
As well as details on what is and isn't in that download archive.
Well, that's interesting. Think I'll do that right now.
Hmm, Score:5, Insightful. Apparently there are at least three or four moderators who suffer the same overwhelming superiority complex and lack of connection to the real world as you do.
Here are some hints.
1. Yes, it's +5 insightful. No, that doesn't mean it really is insightful.
2. Get over yourself.
3. The geeks I know with more than half a brain have the ability to interact socially, recognize that there's more to life than just geek stuff, and are mature enough to run their lives based on what they want to do and accomplish instead of desperately seeking validation from some smarmy commentary on the internet, of all places.
4. They also have sufficient intelligence to recognize that Slashdot is a social networking site for geeks. Yes, really.
4a. ...and not care, so long as it serves their aim.
A label is just a label. Deal with it.
Don't know quite what you're doing, but your rant does demonstrate that, yeah, you really don't get it.
1) A huge personal data sink where I could put all of my information in one basket to be sold to the highest bidder, analyzed, and then acted upon with absolutely no benefit to me.
You do realize you don't have to put in lots of information, don't you? There's very, very, very little that Facebook actually requires you to enter.
2) A marginally effective communication tool. Signal to noise ratio sucked, because much like Twitter, you had a constant stream of information that was barely useful, relevant or interesting. Especially, when there is a huge trend to manipulate you into posting other people's content on your wall for marketing purposes.
Signal to noise ratio was a bit off for me, to start. So I blocked anything coming from games and turned off anything coming from the small number of people who were on my Friends list who were the worst offenders at constantly posting status updates. If I want to know anything about them, I go to their profile page.
Which turned Facebook into an incredibly useful communications tool for me. YMMV. I have regular conversations with a cousin who I hadn't seen in years because we lived on opposite sides of the world (literally) and I didn't know her e-mail address. Friends change e-mails? I don't have to know - they stay in the same place on Facebook.
3) A gaming platform thinly disguised as a social networking platform where Facebook was constantly fighting to get a real piece of the financial action taking place.
No, it's a social networking platform that sees a lucrative side business in gaming. Don't like it? Don't play the games. You don't have to, you know.
I have tried a handful of games from time to time. Yes, I tried Farmville to see what all the fuss was about. Bored me. Deleted. End of that.
And I can't imagine why you're getting a whole load of spam. I have never gotten spam from Facebook. Not once. I have received e-mails that I signed up for, until I decided, ehh, not interested, and changed my prefs. Result=nothing. As in no more e-mails. Easy.
When we disagree, refuse to participate, and quite often make condescending and derisive comments towards other people that don't understand what we see you misinterpret that as us "not getting it".
Well, yes. What's the alternative? Either you are refusing to admit that something that's not useful to you might possibly be useful to someone else, or you're just being smug and - you said it yourself - condescending because you're too cool to use Facebook, in which case you're just being an immature jerk. Or you don't get it. Which is it?
if you don't like Facebook, don't use it. Easy. Done. Move on with your life. Let the insignificant masses who are so inferior to you have their fun.
Anybody that puts money into this is a sucker
Insert standard disclaimers - past performance is no guarantee of future performance, you should only invest as much as you can afford to lose, all investments carry an element of risk, etc. An investor either makes an educated gamble, or they do something on a whim. If it's the latter, well, it doesn't matter if it's Facebook or HP, they're making an uneducated gamble.